My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with talcum powder. Another nun plugged the sink and filled it with water. I never understood the nuns. One was old and the other was young. The young one talked to me sometimes, asked me what I would do for the long weekend, if I’d see my folks over Christmas, and so forth. The old one looked the other way and twisted her robes in her fists when she saw me coming.
My classroom was
the school’s old library. It was a messy old library room, with books and
magazines splayed out all over the place and a whistling radiator and big
fogged-up windows overlooking Sixth Street. I put two student desks together to
make up my desk at the front of the room, next to the chalkboard. I kept a
down-filled sleeping bag in a cardboard box in the back of the room and covered
the sleeping bag with old newspapers. Between classes I took the sleeping bag
out, locked the door, and napped until the bell rang. I was usually still drunk
from the night before. Sometimes I had a drink at lunch at the Indian
restaurant around the corner, just to keep me going — sharp wheat ale in a squat, brown bottle. McSorley’s was there but
I didn’t like all that
nostalgia. That bar made me roll my eyes. I rarely made my way down to the
school cafeteria, but when I did, the principal, Mr. Kishka, would stop me and
smile broadly and say, “Here she comes, the vegetarian.” I don’t know why he
thought I was a vegetarian. What I took from the cafeteria were prepackaged
digits of cheese, chicken nuggets, and greasy dinner rolls.
I had one
student, Angelika, who came and ate her lunch with me in my classroom.
“Miss Mooney,”
she called me. “I’m having a problem with my mother.”
She was one of
two girlfriends I had. We talked and talked. I told her that you couldn’t get
fat from being ejaculated into.
“Wrong, Miss
Mooney. The stuff makes you thick in the middle. That’s why girls get so thick
in the middle. They’re sluts.”
She had a
boyfriend she visited in prison every weekend. Each Monday was a new story
about his lawyers, how much she loved him, and so forth. She always had the
same face on. It was like she already knew all the answers to her questions.
I had another
student who drove me crazy. Popliasti. He was a wiry, blond, acned sophomore
with a heavy accent. “Miss Mooney,” he’d say, standing up at his desk. “Let me
help you with the problem.” He’d take the chalk out of my hand and draw a
picture of a cock-and-balls on the board. This cock-and-balls became a kind of
insignia for the class. It appeared on all their homework, on exams, etched
into every desk. I didn’t mind it. It made me laugh. But Popliasti and his
incessant interruptions, a few times I lost my cool.
“I cannot teach
you if you act like animals!” I screamed.
We cannot learn
if you are crazy like this, screaming, with your hair messy,” said Popliasti,
running around the room, flipping books off window ledges. I could have done
without him.
But my seniors were
all very respectful. I was in charge of preparing them for the SAT. They came
to me with legitimate questions about math and vocabulary, which I had a hard
time answering. A few times in calculus, I admitted defeat and spent the hour
jabbering on about my life.
“Most people
have had anal sex,” I told them. “Don’t look so surprised.”
And, “My
boyfriend and I don’t use condoms. That’s what happens when you trust
somebody.”
Something about
that old library room made Principal Kishka keep his distance. I think he knew
if he ever set foot in there, he’d be in charge of cleaning it up and getting
rid of me. Most of the books were useless mismatched sets of outdated
encyclopedias, Ukrainian bibles, Nancy Drew. I even found some girlie
magazines, under an old map of Soviet Russia folded up in a drawer marked
Sister Koszinska. One good thing I found was an old encyclopedia of worms. It
was a coverless, fist-thick volume of brittle paper chipped at the corners. I
tried to read it between classes when I couldn’t sleep. I tucked it into the
sleeping bag with me, plied open the binding, let my eyes roll over the small,
musty print. Each entry was more unbelievable than the last. There were
roundworms and horseshoe worms and worms with two heads and worms with teeth like
diamonds and worms as large as house cats, worms that sang like crickets or
could disguise themselves as small stones or lilies or could stretch their jaws
to accommodate a human baby. What is this trash they’re feeding children these
days, I thought. I slept and got up and taught algebra and went back into the
sleeping bag. I zipped it up over my head. I burrowed deep down and pinched my
eyes closed. My head throbbed and my mouth felt like wet paper towels. When the
bell rang, I got out and there was Angelika with her brown-bag lunch saying,
“Miss Mooney, there’s something in my eye and that’s why I’m crying.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Close the door.” The floor was black-and-piss-colored checkerboard linoleum.
The walls were shiny, cracking, piss-colored walls.
I had a
boyfriend who was still in college. He wore the same clothes every single day:
a blue pair of Dickies and a paper-thin button down. The shirt was western
style with opalescent snaps. You could see his chest hair and nipples through
it. I didn’t say anything. He had a nice face, but fat ankles and a soft,
wrinkly neck. “Lots of girls at school want to date me,” he said often. He was
studying to be a photographer, which I didn’t take seriously at all. I figured
he would work in an office after he graduated, would be grateful to have a real
job like that, would feel happy and boastful to be employed, a bank account in
his name, a suit in his closet, et cetera, et cetera. He was sweet. One time
his mother came to visit from South Carolina. He introduced me as his “friend
who lives downtown.” The mother was horrible. A tall blonde with fake boobs.
“What do you use
on your face at night?” is what she asked me when the boyfriend went to the
toilet.
I was thirty. I had an ex-husband. I got alimony and had decent health insurance through the Archdiocese of New York. My parents, upstate, sent me care packages full of postage stamps and decaffeinated teas. I called my ex-husband when I was drunk and complained about my job, my apartment, the boyfriend, my students, anything that came to mind. He was remarried already, in Chicago. He did something with law. I never understood his job, and he never explained anything to me.
The boyfriend
came and went on weekends. Together we drank wine and whiskey, romantic things
I liked. He could handle it. He looked the other way, I guess. But he was one
of those idiots about cigarettes.
“How can you
smoke like that?” he’d say. “Your mouth tastes like Canadian bacon.”
“Ha ha,” I said
from my side of the bed. I went under the sheets. Half my clothes, books,
unopened mail, cups, ashtrays, half my life was stuffed between the mattress
and the wall.
“Tell me all
about your week,” I said to the boyfriend. “Well Monday I woke up at
eleven-thirty a.m.,” he’d start. He could go on all day. He was from
Chattanooga. He had a nice, soft voice. It had a nice sound to it, like an old
radio. I got up and filled a mug with wine and sat on the bed.
“The line at the
grocery store was average,” he was saying.
Later: “But I
don’t like Lacan. When people are so incoherent, it means they’re arrogant.”
“Yeah.”
By the time he
was done talking we could go out for dinner. We could get drinks. All I had to
do was walk around and sit down and tell him what to order. He took care of me
that way. He rarely poked his head into my private life. When he did, I turned
into an emotional woman.
“Why don’t you
quit your job?” he asked. “You can afford it.”
“Because I love
those kids,” I answered. My eyes welled up with tears. “They’re all such
beautiful people. I just love them.” I was drunk.
I bought all my
beer from the bodega on the corner of East Tenth and First Avenue. The
Egyptians who worked there were all very handsome and complimentary. They gave
me free candy — individually wrapped Twizzlers, Pop Rocks. They
dropped them into the paper bag and winked. I’d buy two or three forties and a pack of cigarettes
on my way home from school each afternoon and go to bed and watch Married…with
Children and Sally Jessy Raphael on my small black-and-white television, drink
and smoke and snooze. When it got dark I’d go out again for more forties and,
on occasion, food. Around ten p.m. I’d switch to vodka and would pretend to
better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up
on me.
“All good here,”
I pretended to say. “Just bettering myself, as always.”
Or sometimes I
went to this one bar on Avenue A. I tried to order drinks that I didn’t like so
that I would drink them slower. I’d order gin and tonic or gin and soda or a
gin martini or Guinness. I’d told the bartender — an old Polish lady — at the beginning, “I don’t like talking
while I drink, so I may not talk to you.”
“Okay,” she’d said. “No problem.” She was very respectful.
Every year, the
kids had to take a big exam that let the state know just how badly I was at
doing my job. The exams were designed for failure. Even I couldn’t pass them.
The other math
teacher was a little Filipina who I knew made less money than me for doing the
same job and lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Spanish Harlem with three kids
and no husband. She had some kind of respiratory disease and a big mole on her
nose and wore her blouses buttoned to the throat with ridiculous bows and
brooches and lavish plastic pearl necklaces. She was a very devout Catholic.
The kids made fun of her for that. They called her the “little Chinese lady.”
She was a much better math teacher than me, but she had an unfair advantage.
She took all the students who were good at math, all the kids who back in the
Ukraine had been beaten with sticks and made to learn their multiplication
tables, decimal places, exponents, all the tricks of the trade. Whenever anyone
talked about the Ukraine, I pictured either a stark, gray forest full of
howling black wolves or a trashy bar on a highway full of tired male
prostitutes.
My students were
all horrible at math. I got stuck with the dummies. Popliasti, worst of all,
could barely add two and two. There was no way my kids could ever pass that big
exam. When the day came to take the test, the Filipina and I looked at each
other like, Who are we kidding? I passed out the tests, had them break the
seals, showed them how to fill in the bubbles properly with the right pencils,
told them, “Try your best,” and then I took the tests home and switched all
their answers. No way those dummies would cost me my job.
“Outstanding!”
said Mr. Kishka when the results came in. He’d wink and give me the thumbs-up
and cross himself and slowly shut the door behind him.
Every year it
was the same.
I had this one
other girlfriend, Jessica Hornstein, a homely Jewish girl I’d met in college.
Her parents were second cousins. She lived with them on Long Island and took
the LIRR into the city some nights to go out with me. She showed up in normal
jeans and sneakers and opened her backpack and pulled out cocaine and an
ensemble suitable for the cheapest prostitute on the Vegas strip. She got her
cocaine from some high-school kid in Bethpage. It was horrible. Probably cut
with powdered laundry detergent. And Jessica had wigs of all colors and styles:
a neon-blue bob, a long blonde Barbarella-type do, a red perm, a jet-black
Japanese one. She had one of those colorless, bug-eyed faces. I always felt
like Cleopatra next to Opie when I went out with her. “Going clubbing” was
always her request, but I couldn’t stand all that. A night under a colored
lightbulb over twenty-dollar cocktails, getting hit on by skinny Indian engineers,
not dancing, a stamp on the back of my hand I couldn’t scrub off. I felt
vandalized.
But Jessica
Hornstein knew how to “bump and grind.” Most evenings she bid me adieu on the
arm of some no-face corporate type to show him “the time of his life” back at
his condo in Murray Hill or wherever those people lived. Occasionally I took
one of the Indians up on his offer, stepped into an unmarked cab to Queens,
looked through his medicine cabinet, got some head, and took the subway home at
six in the morning just in time to shower, call my ex-husband, and make it to
school before the second bell. But mostly I left the club early and got myself
on a seat in front of my old Polish lady bartender, Jessica Hornstein be
damned. I dipped a finger in my beer and rubbed off my mascara. I looked around
at the other women at the bar. Makeup made a girl look so desperate, I thought.
People were so dishonest with their clothes and personalities. And then I
thought, Who cares? Let them do what they want. It’s me I should worry about.
Now and then I cried out to my students. I threw my arms in the air. I put my
head on my desk. I asked them for help. But what could I expect? They turned
around at their desks to talk to one another, put on their headphones, pulled
out their books, potato chips, looked out the window, did anything but try to
console me.
Oh, okay, there
were a few fine times. One day I went to the park and watched a squirrel run up
a tree. A cloud flew around in the sky. I sat down on a patch of dry yellow grass
and let the sun warm my back. I may have even tried to do a crossword puzzle.
Once, I found a twenty-dollar bill in a pair of old jeans. I drank a glass of
water. It got to be summer. The days got intolerably long. School let out. The
boyfriend graduated and moved back to Tennessee. I bought an air conditioner
and paid a kid to carry it down the street and up the stairs to my apartment.
Then my ex-husband left a message on my machine: “I’m coming into town,” he
said. “Let’s have lunch, or dinner. We can have drinks. Next week. No big
deal,” he said. “Talk.”
No big deal. I’d
see about that. I dried out for a few days, did some calisthenics on the floor
of my apartment. I borrowed a vacuum from my neighbor, a middle-aged gay with
long, acne-scarred dimples, who eyed me like a worried dog. I took a walk to
Broadway and spent some of my money on new clothes, high-heeled shoes, silk
panties. I had my makeup done and bought whatever products they suggested. I
had my hair cut. I got my nails polished. I took myself out to lunch. I ate a
salad for the first time in years. I went to the movies. I called my mom. “I’ve
never felt better,” I said. “I’m having a great summer. A great summer
holiday.” I tidied up my apartment. I filled a vase with bright flowers.
Anything good I could think to do, I did. I was filled with hope. I bought new
sheets and towels. I put on some music. “Bailar,” I said to myself. Look, I’m
speaking Spanish. My mind is fixing itself, I thought. Everything is going to
be okay.
And then the day
came. I went to meet my ex-husband at a fashionable bistro on MacDougal Street
where the waitresses wore pretty dresses with white lace–trimmed collars. I got
there early and sat at the bar and watched the waitresses move around so
gingerly with their round, black trays of colored cocktails and small plates of
bread and bowls of olives. A short sommelier came in and out like the conductor
of an orchestra. The nuts on the bar were flavored with sage. I lit a cigarette
and looked at the clock. I was so early. I ordered a drink. A scotch and soda.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. I ordered another drink, just scotch this time. I lit
another cigarette. A girl sat down next to me. We started talking. She was
waiting, too. “Men,” she said. “They like to torture us.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, and turned around on my stool.
Then it was
eight o’clock and my ex-husband walked in. He spoke to the maître d’ and nodded
in my direction and followed a girl to a table by the window and just waved me
over. I took my drink.
“Thank you for
meeting me,” he said, removing his jacket.
I lit a
cigarette and opened the wine list. My ex cleared his voice but said nothing
for a while. Then he did his usual hem and haw about the restaurant, how he’d
read about the chef in whatever magazine, how the food on the plane was awful,
the hotel, how the city had changed, the menu was interesting, the weather
here, the weather there, and so on. “You look tired,” he said. “Order whatever
you want,” he told me, as though I was his niece, some babysitter character.
“I will, thank
you,” I said.
A waitress came
over and told us the specials. My ex charmed her. He was always kinder to the
waitress than he was to me. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You’re the best.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
I made up my mind
to order then pretend to go to the bathroom and walk out. I took off my dangly
earrings and put them in my purse. I uncrossed my legs. I looked at him. He
didn’t smile or do anything. He just sat there with his elbows on the table. I
missed the boyfriend. He’d been so easy. He’d been very respectful.
“And how’s
Vivian?” I asked.
“She’s fine. She
got a promotion, busy. She’s okay. Sends her regards.”
“I’m sure. Send
her my regards, too.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Thanks,” I
said.
“You’re
welcome,” he said.
The waitress
came back with another drink and took our order. I ordered a bottle of wine. I
thought, I’ll stay for the wine. The whiskey was wearing off. The waitress went
away and my ex got up to use the men’s room, and when he got back he asked me
to stop calling him.
“No, I think
I’ll keep calling,” I said.
“I’ll pay you,”
he said.
“How much money
are we talking?”
He told me.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll take the deal.”
Our food came.
We ate in silence. And then I couldn’t eat anymore. I got up. I didn’t say
anything. I went home. I went back and forth to the bodega. My bank called. I
wrote a letter to the Ukrainian Catholic school. Dear Principal Kishka, I
wrote. Thank you for letting me teach at your school.
Please throw
away the sleeping bag in the cardboard box in the back of my classroom. I have
to resign for personal reasons. Just so you know, I’ve been fudging the state
exams. Thanks again. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
There was a
church attached to the back of the school — a cathedral with great big mosaics of people holding
up a finger as though to say, Be quiet. I thought I’d go in there and leave my
letter of resignation with one of the priests. Also I wanted a little
tenderness, I think, and I imagined the priest putting his hand on my head and
calling me something like “my dear,” or “my sweet,” or “little one.” I don’t
know what I was thinking. “My pet.”
I’d been up on
bad cocaine and drinking for days. I’d roped a few men back to my apartment and
showed them all my belongings, stretched out flesh-colored tights and proposed
we take turns hanging each other. Nobody lasted more than a few hours. The
letter to Principal Kishka sat on the bedside table. It was time. I checked my
reflection in my bathroom mirror before I left the house. I thought I looked
pretty normal. That couldn’t be possible. I put the last of the stuff up my
nose. I put on a baseball cap. I put on some more ChapStick.
On the way to
church I stopped at McDonald’s for a Diet Coke. I hadn’t been around people in
weeks. There were whole families sitting down together, sipping on straws,
sedate, mulling with their fries like broken horses at hay. A homeless person,
man or woman I couldn’t tell, had gotten into the trash by the entrance. At
least I wasn’t completely alone, I thought. It was hot out. I wanted that Diet
Coke. But the lines to order made no sense. Most people were huddled in random
patterns, gazing up at the menu boards, eyes glazed over, touching their chins,
pointing, nodding.
“Are you in
line?” I kept asking them. Nobody would answer me.
Finally I just
approached a young black boy in a visor behind the counter. I ordered my Diet
Coke.
“What size?” he
asked me.
He pulled out
four cups in ascending order of size. The largest size stood about a foot high
off the counter.
“I’ll take that
one,” I said.
This felt like a
great occasion. I can’t explain it. I felt immediately employed with great
power. I plunked my straw in and sucked. It was good. It was the best thing I’d
ever tasted. I thought of ordering another one, for when I’d finished that one.
But that would be exploitive, I thought. Better let this one have its day.
Okay, I thought. One at a time. One Diet Coke at a time. Now off to the priest.
The last time
I’d been in that church was for some Catholic holiday. I’d sat in the back and
done my best to kneel, cross myself, move my mouth at the Latin sayings, and so
forth. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it had some effect on me. It was
cold in there. My nipples stood on end, my hands were swollen, my back hurt. I
must have stunk of alcohol. I watched the students in their uniforms line up
for the Eucharist. The ones who genuflected at the altar did it so deeply,
wholly, they broke my heart. Most of the liturgy was in Ukrainian. I saw
Popliasti play with the padded bar you knelt on, lifting it up and letting it
slam down. There were beautiful stained glass windows, a lot of gold.
But when I got there that day with the letter, the church was locked. I sat down on the damp stone steps and finished my Diet Coke. A shirtless bum walked by.
“Pray for rain,”
he said.
“Okay.”
I went to
McSorley’s and ate a bowl of pickled onions. I tore the letter up.
The sun shone
on.